This is an episode of HawkTalk, datacenterHawk’s series of candid one on one conversations with executives and leaders in the data center industry. If you enjoyed this episode, you can check them all out on our blog. If you’d like to know when we release future episodes, you can subscribe here.

Rob Morris took some time to sit down and give datacenterHawk an update on how Skybox has grown since we last caught up with him 2 years ago. Below are some of the topics we dove into during our discussion.

Growth in the Houston and Dallas markets

Since we last spoke with Rob, Skybox has continued to expand in both Houston and Dallas.

On their Houston campus, they’ve built several high-density, high power compute projects to bring their facilities to near full capacity.

In Dallas, Skybox delivered their last building back in 2018 and decided to watch the market. They kept about 50 acres of land open for a potential build-to-suit opportunity and plan to expand in the market within the next 2-3 years.

Opportunity in the midst of the pandemic

In March 2020 when Northern America was hit with stay-at-home orders, there was a lot of pain felt throughout the nation.

The data center industry is one area that was uniquely put into a position of opportunity and growth. With a vast amount of people suddenly spending more time at home, they turned to the internet to connect with others, which meant more data that needed a data center to live in.

Plans for future growth

Skybox is planning to expand in 2021, starting with a brand new campus in Elk Grove Village, a high-volume area for data center providers serving the Chicago market.

Their first facility, which is currently in shell state, is slated to deliver 190,000 SF and 30 MW once completed in November of 2021.

Looking forward

We’re excited to see where Skybox will go and the growth that’s in store for them moving forward. We’ll continue to track them and other data center providers on our platform in 2021 and beyond.

Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on the data center industry.